68m YouTube visitors swamp firm's Utube site

By Sally Pook

12:01AM GMT 03 Nov 2006

A small American company which supplies industrial tubes and piping is suing YouTube, the video website, in a case of mistaken internet identity.

The Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation, of Perrysburg, Ohio, has a website called utube.com which has had millions of mistaken hits from people searching for YouTube.com which lets users upload, view, and share video clips.

The company, which employs just 17 people, had 68 million hits in August alone. The site crashed repeatedly, forcing the company to move its site to providers with larger servers to handle the traffic.

Ralph Girkins, the president of Universal Tube, said: "We have had to move our site five times in an effort to stay ahead of the YouTube visitors. But we were there first by 10 years."

Universal Tube claims that it has lost business because genuine customers have had difficulty in accessing its site. It shut down last month for four days just before Google announced plans to buy YouTube for £833 million.

Related Articles

The company issued an online apology to its clients saying the website had been "paralysed" by the Google announcement. It is asking the courts to force Google to stop using the YouTube address or pay for creating a new domain name for it.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court, does not specify any damages.

YouTube, launched in a Californian garage by Chad Hurley, 29, and Steve Chen, 27, in February last year, has an estimated 72 million individual visitors each month.

Visitors watch videos on YouTube more than 100 million times daily. About 65,000 clips are uploaded on to the site every 24 hours